Comestible products are extremely well-regulated in terms of the suitability of products for human and/or animal consumption, and in order to determine whether the products meet the regulatory requirements, the foodstuffs must be monitored. It is particularly important to monitor the foodstuffs for potentially toxic compounds and/or for foreign bodies introduced into products designated for consumption.
In certain industries, particularly those which deal with liquid or semi-liquid foodstuffs, the comestible products may be channelled through a network of pipes in order to transport the products from location to location. Typically, these pipes are opaque, and therefore optical inspection of the foodstuffs therein is not possible.
Such foodstuffs are commonly monitored by non-optical means, such as by X-ray interrogation and/or metal detection of the product as they pass a given monitoring point. By way of example, in the meat-processing industry, a slurry of meat products may contain bones, skin, hair or shot from a gun which is not desirable for consumption. X-ray interrogation is able to discern whether such foreign bodies have entered into the piped slurry.
Given the rate of throughput of comestible products through a food-transit network, contaminated product may have passed through the interrogation region prior to determination of the contamination, in which case, the user must determine where the contaminated product is. This can be estimated, based on an expected flowrate in the pipes. However, it is preferred that a non-toxic trackable element and/or contaminant be inserted into the system in order to determine whether the system can accurately detect foreign or undesirable objects of a given size at any given time
To introduce such a trackable element and/or contaminant into the system, there are only two options: either the system as a whole must be shut down, and the trackable element and/or contaminant safely inserted into an inlet port; or the trackable element and/or contaminant can be inserted into an inlet port of the pipe network whilst the system is operational.
The former option is undesirable, since the efficiency of the processing of the product is drastically reduced by operation shutdown due to the time it takes the system to get back up to speed, by which point the trackable element and/or contaminant has already passed the monitoring equipment. However, the latter case is also undesirable, since opening of the inlet port results in discharge of the comestible product, which will create a mess and result in loss of productivity, especially if the product is highly pressurised.